


Life as one knows it

by StopitGerald



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Hard to explain topics, Nostalgia, basically some in character rambling, happy to be alive fic, thoughts on life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-19
Updated: 2020-11-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:42:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27634276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopitGerald/pseuds/StopitGerald
Summary: Guinevere’s brain moves at the speed of light, she thinks and thinks and thinks. Sometimes it’s beautiful.
Relationships: Craig Boone/Female Courier
Comments: 1
Kudos: 20





	Life as one knows it

**Author's Note:**

> This is from 2018, but I cleaned it up a tiny tad. Unchanged other than grammar fixes. 
> 
> Some of this is niche as Guin has a very very detailed story that isn’t completely explained here. TLDR is that she got shot, and when she woke up she became Incredibly mind blowingly intelligent. 
> 
> Perhaps not realistic, but fun.

Life is beautiful because the way she struggles with her shoelaces one morning reminds her of when her father taught her how to in the first place. When she was about five years old. 

She’s thirty-seven now, and how beautiful that is, she thinks. She has lived out thirty seven years, thirty two of them spent tying her shoelaces every morning before she wanders onwards. 

When she wanders, she discovers. Long stretches of sandy dunes, a crag of red rock with a stream running through it, likely older than all of time, much older than her thirty seven years. And when she complains about her ancient bones to Boone, when he helps her stand, she still knows the Earth beneath her has bones tenfold as old and tenfold as beautiful. 

When she wanders, she discovers little farmhomes, abandoned by their owners, and prewar planes crashed into mountainsides. When she stills she can imagine what they sounded like when they used to fly overhead. 

She discovers a faded, clear marble, and a bottle cap with a star on the underside. She holds her hand out to Boone and drops it into his grasp. For safe keepings, and a gift from me to you, she says. He keeps them. 

When she wanders, she feels lost, she feels alone when she sees how far the land before her stretches, tenfold as long and as wide as she can even begin to imagine. And she has to contain her spillings in a little brown notebook. 

It’s okay, because there are people who like to read. It’s okay because there are people who like to look at her when she talks and listen when she calls. When she forgets to tie her shoelaces, they don’t hold it against her, but Boone always does. He tells her, “You’ll trip.”

When she comes to the Tops for the first time, Benny reacts like he’s seen a ghost, and that’s because she sort of is. ghosts are billowy and sad, and she sort of is. 

She doesn’t kill him when she has the shot, and she smiles when he sends bodyguards to kill her. 

Life is beautiful because Cazador buzzing in the canyon reminds her of the sound of the fizzy lights outside The Kings’ old building, and the feel of her leather boots on her fingers when she disrobes reminds her of her father’s worn old hands as he would spin her around in their kitchen. 

How beautiful, the commotion on the strip when the slots are loose, and the sounds of glass shattering on Freeside concrete. How beautiful, the sound of Troop’s boots crunching rocky soil, and their appreciative glances in her direction when they realize she’s cleaned an entire Legion outpost before they even woke up. 

They share pictures of their sweethearts back home and sing with crunching, rocky voices to her plucking on her guitar around a campfire before the lieutenant rounds them all up and chastises them for staying up late. 

How beautiful, the Mormon fort at the crack of dawn, and the relief on Julie Farkas’ face when she dumps a bag of stimpaks and fixer on the table in the tent between them. She gives the caps to the children loitering outside the gate. 

The sun rising and setting, rosy pink and bloody blue, Boone’s aloe green eyes piercing the back of her skull like a third bullet when Swank offers her to stay at his room. She declines. 

The Lucky 38 is dark and dim but she’s moved everyone to the penthouse now. Floor to ceiling windows and she can see for miles the wasteland beyond, she dances in the dining space when no one is awake yet, but sometimes she waits five minutes later, so she can feel Boone’s aloe green eyes following her every move across the smudged marble floors under her bare feet. 

She waits for the day he’ll cross the space between them, stop waiting for her to pretend not to notice him. She likes the attention. 

Life is beautiful because she has to crack the neck of the spy who’s just pushed the NCR sniper off of the tower while Kimball addresses the crowd below. 

She doesn’t like close combat, Boone warily kisses her knuckles when they reunite outside the Dam. 

They take a break, they go north, and it is wonderful, the way she lies, nearly undressed, at the edge of a stream, her hair tangled in rocks and plants, her toes in the water. The way Boone laughs when she comes up with twigs in her locks makes her heart shake. 

Arcade’s eyes glitter when he tells a smartass joke. He likes when she brings him books. 

Raul likes one brand of rum more than the other, she always stocks the one he prefers. He hums when he works on guns and bolts and machines. 

She’s become so smart and it is so beautiful. It had dulled her life at first, she’s so sorry for forgetting how wonderful it all is. 

When she and Boone pass through Goodsprings, he pulls her close to a slow song on Trudy’s radio, the one she’d fixed all that time ago. Boone tastes like he’s just had a smoke and the shitty toothpaste they use when they travel long distances. She decides to herself this is her first kiss. The other ones don’t matter. 

Cass gives good hugs, but you have to earn it, and her laugh ripples through a room. 

It is so beautiful when Veronica plays with the laser pistols until she messes something up. Arcade always has to fix them. 

Lily brings flowers and origami dollar bills when she visits, and she’s never treasured anything more. 

Boone thinks of his own gifts from her when he sees the exchange. 

When Rex barks and barks, when he leaps into the King’s lap when they bring him by, it makes her smile so wide her face hurts. 

Benny is taken to the fort, and she’s smiling when she slips him a Bobby pin and steals the slave ledger. She’s smiling when she gives melody back her bear. She looks at Siri for a long time, a blank stare with more than a thousand words behind it. The woman swallows in anticipation. 

Ceaser doesn’t expect Benny to be gone in the morning, he’d expected her to revel in his death. He doesn’t expect the flaming blade thrust through his chest, or for the woman who kills him to tell him that it’s for Carla. That wasn’t her name, was it? 

The dam is a mess when she gets there, but then There is the blood under the flame on her sword, then there is the Legate’s head on a pike, Ceaser long dead by her hand, when she’s shot through the abdomen. 

She thinks it’s Dr Richards who’s screaming for more bandages, the man who first saw her potential when she treated all of his patients with no prior training. She smiles because his trust and his encouragement were beautiful. 

There’s blood in her mouth and it tastes like iron, she thinks of the big, wonderful tower at Helios, providing enough power to keep thousands of lives Stable. 

And then she’s thinking of McNamara’s blue eyes, steel blue, iron blue, and the way he’d tricked her. 

She thinks of Joshua Graham, handsome, pocked hands curling around his bandages and cradling her cheeks, fire blossoming in his eyes but not the kind that hurts. 

She thinks of Dean Domino and the way he’d danced with her that night, she can’t remember a better swing. 

And Christine’s smile, trembling hands. The way her shaven head felt beneath her finger tips when she held her as she cried. 

She thinks of the stealth suit, chipper as ever, “we’re out of med-x!” 

The sun setting, bloody blue. When she wakes, she thinks of how beautiful life is when the birds sing as you come to consciousness, and how beautiful it is that humans have learned and retained information on how to care for the wounded and nurse them back to health. It shows that they’ve learned to say, “I care for you.”

Boone is asleep at her side, knolled over in a rickety rusty chair. His head is hanging and his sunglasses are missing. Isn’t he wonderful? How he twitches when he dreams, how his face is permanently etched with frown lines and his brows drawn in concentration? 

It’s so beautiful the way his eyes can’t look at anything but her when she stirs, and it is so beautiful when he closes the gap to kiss her when she smiles at him. 

He is tender with her wound, but not with her heart when he chastises her for getting into trouble in the first place, when his eyes for a second are watery at the thought of her death. 

He smooths his harshness over with a question. She says yes. They’re married seventy two hours later. Illegibly bad penmanship on her part has them fill out their liscense twice, and Cass actually bats away tears when she signs as the witness. 

He carries her over the threshold of their bedroom on their wedding night, and she thinks, cupping his cheeks and kissing him without fear, without hesitation or guilt, that tradition is beautiful. 

Life is beautiful because she celebrates the next morning with eggs and fruit and every other food she can get her hands on and a full breakfast table complete with chatter and laughter and love. Love. Love when Arcade has to beat Cass between the shoulder blades when she chokes on her food at a joke that Veronica dropped. Love when Raul helps her clear the dishes, love when Boone bats her away from the cleaning to do it himself. Love when they sigh and cry their congratulations and their adoration for friends, for family. It’s family when Arcade introduces a young man he’s been seeing recently as though he needs the validation of acceptance. 

After a dinner, she decides he’s good enough for him, and winks across the table. He smiles. 

She and Cass have a girls night and pass out on her bed after wine and some really watery nail polish. She wakes up with Cass slung over her legs, and Boone’s crawled into the other side of the bed, they’re both still sleeping. 

She takes to cooking breakfast more often. My father taught me, she says, and it’s true, and the eggs are good, and it’s true. But she doesn’t make the eggs for the taste, but for the way she gets to hold Boone’s hand under the table while they eat, and the way Veronica always douses hers in ketchup while Arcade gags at her. 

She takes long walks, and she still babbles endlessly to Boone like she has since the day he offered to listen, when her little brown notebook had run out of places to store her overflowing thoughts in her overfilled brain. Too much bullet in there. 

She tells him about the position of the sun, and the photosynthesis project she’d been reading up on, and she tells him about myocardial infections, and what words in Swedish translate to in English. 

He only begins to understand when she starts to tell him about curves on the earth and the way gunpowder changed ancient Chinese civilizations. And when she talks about changing the directional input valves in the under system at the dam to increase efficiency by 3.34%. That’s a lot, she tells him, rolling over in bed, when you think about it. He agrees. 

She doesn’t dream, hasn’t. Can’t. Since the bullet, but she doesn’t have to dream anymore. Life is beautiful. Life is wonderful. She cannot list enough ways that that is true, she would fill two hundred and thirty seven of her little brown notebooks with the ways. Two hundred for her thoughts and thirty seven for each year she has been alive. 

When Boone tells her he loves her, she doesn’t have to dream, not anymore. Life can be so beautiful, and I’m sorry, she writes, for ever forgetting that. 


End file.
